Developer Diaries

Condemned 2 Developer Diary Part Two

Bloodshot's Senior Producer talks about reinventing his game's main man.

Welcome to the second installment of GameSpy's exclusive Condemned 2: Bloodshot developer diaries. In today's article the game's Senior Producer, Monolith's David Hasle, explains the evolution of the series' main character and also a bit about the new throwing system. If you missed the first diary, you can find it here!

The development team grew attached to Ethan Thomas as we developed Condemned: Criminal Origins and we felt that we had barely scratched the surface when it came to the depth of his character. Now that we're up to our necks in Condemned 2: Bloodshot, we've worked several aspects of the player's motivation, the gameplay and story itself to bring Ethan Thomas more to life than ever before. One of the areas was the visual look of Ethan himself. We wanted something with more presence, more iconic...

It's a year later... Ethan Thomas, deeply troubled and heavily inebriated as well, is constantly torn apart by the recollections and experiences from Condemned: Criminal Origins. Totally down on his luck, he's bitter and trying to put it all behind him.

We worked closely with Sega and had some great focus group feedback on some different potential variations of what we referred to as the "Extreme Thomas" approach.

We had names for each of them: Mr. Cool, Scarface, Tactical-Assault and Tac-Casual. We got feedback from various people, including Sega themselves, and went through another round of revisions. We wanted to make sure we found that iconic aspect to him that stayed with people. We ended up with the Target image for his shirt -- and that seemed to bring it altogether for us. The target is how Ethan has seen himself since the beginning of Condemned. He's been shot at, thrown out windows, assaulted and left for dead. He clearly doesn't want to be the target anymore -- and it's time for him to take control and focus the reticule on the real enemies...